ARTIST STATEMENT
Wanting to make America great again, Trump welcomed us to his dawning of The Golden Age of America, his Gilded Age 2.0 that will benefit this generation’s Robber Barons. The Golden Age is the Gilded Age, when America was great with tariffs, Jim Crow, income inequality & women had no rights.
But the Golden Age is not golden for WE the People. Even as I move forward chronologically, our country is moving backward as a society. The social welfare programs put in place as guardrails that I believed would protect me in my old age, are slowly being dismantled. There will be nothing golden about my golden years. Trump wants to take women backwards. The mythology of mid-century America that we fought against has returned in full force. The insistence that all women identify as wives and mothers that gripped our consciousness as I was growing up has returned in the glorification of the trad wife.
Trad wives, women who value being a traditional wife, subscribing to homemaking & conventional gender roles, are the social media’s generation iteration of 1950s white suburban housewife. Like a toxic overspill, remnants of a once idealized America yet stifling society, have resurfaced. There is no way to whitewash it when Trump talks about wanting to Make America Great Again, what is meant is “Make America White Again, & the fear of the browning of America has driven Trump’s draconian immigration policy. No amount of gold can hide how morally bankrupt our country has become.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sally Edelstein is an award-winning N.Y. collage artist and writer who considers herself a visual archeologist digging deep into American mythology, excavating and examining the social fictions we and society tell ourselves over the past 80 years. Repurposing the past through a personal lens to provide insight into today’s worlds, she is an incurable collector of vintage ephemera, utilizing imagery found in her collection for her hand-cut collages, drawing heavily on popular culture & how it both informs our identities and fragments it.
A nationally exhibited artist who received her BFA from SVA, her work has been shown at Arlington Art Museum, Museum of Sonoma County, Brown University, and Heckscher Museum of Art, and was recently the featured artist at The Art Center of Highland Park. Edelstein is a multiple award recipient from the Society of Three-Dimensional Illustrators, The Art Directors Club, and The Society of Illustrators. In addition to guest lecturing on post-war American culture at Fordham University and The New School For Social Research, she has been a consultant for ABC News. Told through both text and illustration, her blog Envisioning the American Dream probes the ways that advertising and media steer our perceptions of race, class, and gender.
Combining her skills as an artist and storyteller, her recent short film “Perpetual, based on her essay published in Lilith Magazine, was recently shown as a selection at the New Bedford Film Festival where she won an award for best voice-over. She currently resides in Huntington, N.Y.
© Sally Edelstein